El Salvador - Just the eight checked bags, thanks...

August 4

Hello everyone!

Bienvenido en El Salvador! 

View from my hotel room

Surfing is a big thing in El Salvador

What do you know about it? If you’ve heard anything, it will either be related to gangs…

The MS13 is an infamous gang
which started in Los Angeles

…or Bitcoin.

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as an official
currency, alongside the US dollar, in 2021

There’s far more to this little country, which is genuinely close to the size of Wales, than MS-13 and cryptocurrency. I’ll learn and share a lot about it for at least the next two years.

El Salvador is the only country in Central
America without a Caribbean coastline

Santa Tecla seems to be a bit of
an extension of San Salvador

I had to get there first, of course. Flights were sorted by my new employers for August 4th. My shipping from Malawi, which should have arrived before the end of June, turned up on the morning of August 2nd. A somewhat stressful experience considering I had been told to bring my life across as excess baggage. Cue a frantic 36 hours of unpacking and repacking.

5 large boxes totalling over 140 Kg of stuff

Even before that, I'd been wrapping my
bike to protect it for the journey

Well, not all my life. Hannah is coming in October and the dogs are coming in September. Transporting Mini and Maxi will be a blog in itself! This meant that I was travelling, with my non-living life, by myself. With all of this…

Hannah and I went to a
wedding at the end of July

To Heathrow, with many people dragging the eclectic mix of bags and boxes into the UK’s busiest airport. There was one annoyance when I was forced to break the tape on the bike box for someone to look at it for 30 seconds, decide it actually was a bike, then told to retape the box. This was softened by the fact that I seemingly didn’t have to pay for two of my eight bags, saving me $600.

The same terminal as the one I used to get to
Malawi, though much earlier in the day

My seven hour flight took me from the capital of the UK to the capital of the US. Somehow, I ended up in premium economy with my airline, which made for a pleasant experience. It gave me plenty of time to ponder what would happen in Washington’s airport, as staff at Heathrow had told me that I would have to collect all eight of my pieces of checked luggage and take them to a different part of the airport to re-check them. 

Metal cutlery and ice-cream!!

I had even more time as we waited over an hour in line at US customs. For the small number of US citizens, there were at least 8 officers checking their documents. For the supersnake of international travellers…three. It went down to two for a while as well. Quite a few people missed connections as a result.

An ESTA is required before travelling through the USA

The flipside of this wait was that all bags had been taken off the conveyor, so were easy to find. Two of my new colleagues, met for the first time in the airport, kindly offered to help. So did a man who brought over a large trolley. All cases and bike box loaded on, he then took the trolley…about 50 metres. There was a single conveyor belt, upon which all bags were loaded. The bike box went into a separate area, probably to get lost.

Sunny yet stormy skies

The three of us are pretty tired at this point. With the time difference, we take off at midnight UK time for San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador. The flight was delayed for an hour by some stormy weather, which we then seemed a little bit close to as we flew south.

If you look very closely, you will see my bike box!

There’s a two hour time difference between Washington DC and San Salvador, so the landing time of a little after 9pm local time felt…late. Getting through immigration was a breeze, particularly compared to moving to Malawi. My six regulation bags were almost the first off the carousel, leaving me to practise my Spanish in order to locate the golf bag and bike box. After a little wait, they appeared out of a side door. With a trolley being steered in front of me by my right hand and a bike box being dragged with my left, I made it out to…the rain…

We were met by another teacher and Juan, the school handyman who already has legendary status within our newbie group. He had another man and was happily playing Tetris trying to fit our luggage into a trailer with another man. It turns out I brought the most luggage out of the five newbies who landed that evening…and I am on my own…

Level 95 of Tetris...

We have a week staying in a new hotel in between San Salvador, the capital city, and Santa Tecla, where we will be working. The Hyatt is as comfortable as you’d expect a major hotel chain’s flagship hotel in a country to be. Seems hard for them to appreciate how much water I want to drink, mind.

I'm on the sixth floor

Note the bags snaking along the side of the room

Having been awake for over 24 hours, with only a few catnaps in between, it was time to sleep. I’ve never been to this part of the world before and am really looking forward to exploring my new home.

Underpacked...

Parque del Bicentenario - I'll show you this next time

Love you all,

Matt